I received an interesting question today from an iPhone development newbie as to how they could create an iPhone game using tiles and isometric perspective. While going through and creating their entire game from scratch was out of the question, I pointed them towards a great utility that I found out about recently.

The utility is open source, runs on Windows and Mac is known as Tiled. Tiled is an excellent 2D map editor, and recently support for isometric maps was added to the QT version.

The great thing about Tiled is that the file format, .TMX, works with Cocos2D, and the TMX format is directly supported. Be sure to read the Cocos2D Wiki guide on Tiled Maps.